Be Rapture Ready! The end times are nigh!

John Sutherland

Religious fiction is the hot line in American bookstores. It isn’t a new genre – Pilgrim’s Progress still sells; what’s new is its popularity and profitability; and, most strikingly, its doctrinal aggressiveness. We know that eschatology has filled the vacuum where Cold War ideology used to be. But the Cold War fantasised Mutually Assured Destruction, leaving the faint hope of permanent stalemate; Christian fiction prophesies the coming of the ‘end times’. There is no escape. Prepare. The novels will help.

The first sign that the Apocalypse was approaching was the foundation of Israel in 1948. The Jewish ‘homecoming’ was both miraculous and prophetically inevitable. As Mark Hitchcock, the author of The Coming Islamic Invasion of Israel and Is the Antichrist Alive Today?, puts it, in his latest and most excited tract, The Second Coming of Babylon:[*]

The Jewish people were exiled from their homeland in AD 70. It had been almost 1900 years! It was unthinkable. But the Jews endured the horror of the Nazi death camps, and within a few years thousands of them were home. Over the past fifty years, millions of Jews have returned to Israel. About 37 per cent of the Jews in the world now live there. The current and continuing stream of Jews back to Israel is setting the stage for the Antichrist’s peace covenant with Israel that will trigger the seven-year Tribulation (see Daniel 9.27).

Israel, as Tim LaHaye likes to say, is ‘God’s timepiece’; its foundation is the ‘supersign’. ‘Significantly,’ LaHaye writes, ‘the return of the Jews happened in our generation’ (LaHaye is 75): ‘more weighty evidence that we are indeed living in the end times. Something of enormous proportions is about to happen.’ What liberal Christians had limply read as allegory is, for hardliners, demonstrably converging with history.

End-times theory was formulated for a popular audience in Hal Lindsey and C.C. Carlson’s book The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), which linked the Cold War, imminent nuclear annihilation, Middle East crises and apocalyptic prophecy. Hitherto ‘dispensationalism’ (a doctrine that separates history into several ages in which different tasks were required of man, after the teaching of John Nelson Darby, a 19th-century Plymouth Brethren minister) had been of no more importance, theologically, than Tennessee snake-handling. Lindsey broadened dispensationalism’s doctrinal base and gave end-times religion mass appeal. In his sceptical monograph, Iraq: Babylon of the End-Times?, J. Daniel Hays recalls the impact Lindsey’s book made: ‘As a college freshman in 1971, I brought a copy of The Late Great Planet Earth with me to Auburn University. Everyone on my wing of the dormitory, Christian and non-Christian alike, read the book that year. It scared us to death. We thought the end was near.’[†]

Hays, now Professor of Hebrew Biblical Interpretation at Ouachita Baptist University, no longer thinks that, but millions do. A belief that the end times are imminent is a central tenet of the Christian Right. Since 1989 particularly (the USSR was one of the early candidates for modern Babylon), all ‘significant’ world events have been variously interpreted by end timers according to key Biblical texts. Conviction has been progressively hardened by 9/11, the supposed Clash of Civilisations, the expansion of the European Union and the double destruction of Babylon in the two Gulf wars.

The full text of this book review is only available to subscribers of the London Review of Books.

Letters

I am less sure than John Sutherland that Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’s Left Behind is a ‘rip-off’ of Stephen King’s ‘The Langoliers’ (LRB, 5 June). The idea of passengers disappearing mid-flight has been in the air for some time. In Millennium (1984) John Varley portrayed a genetically ravaged human race raiding doomed planes for spare parts. Varley may or may not have been inspired by the Troughton-era ‘Doctor Who and the Faceless Ones’ (1967).

Marc Hudson
Manchester

Perhaps if the entire Christian Right were ‘instantaneously teleported into Heaven’, as John Sutherland puts it, the rest of us might avoid Armageddon. Roll on the end times!

John Sutherland (LRB, 5 June) had me wondering how many generations have now lived through ‘the end times’? My friend John (he died in his twenties in 1975) spent a week, as an eight-year-old, in the woods near his home in British Columbia, believing he had been ‘left behind’. He’d come home from school to find his minister father, his mother, his siblings, all the Christian neighbours and members of the congregation he’d tried to contact, missing – ‘Raptured’, he thought.

I passed many long Sunday morning sermons – the evening ones were fire and brimstone and worth staying alert for – reading the Christian romance novels written in the 1930s and 1940s by Grace Livingstone Hill, and available from the Sunday School library. It was considered one of her ‘failings’, I was delighted recently to learn, that she described evil in too much detail. I remember a scene in which a young woman was tortured by the Antichrist or one of his minions by being tied to a stake on the Temple Mount, covered in honey, then set upon by ants. She kept true to her faith, however, and although she died, was ‘saved’.

I could never keep straight the prophetic meanings found in the Books of Daniel and Revelation. The Eagle had to be the United States and the Bear the Russians. But what did they do, and when? It was worrying. It made a kind of sense when evangelists warned that the Common Market was the first step towards World Government and domination by the Antichrist. In Canada, the introduction of social insurance numbers in the 1960s, and later of bar codes on merchandise, were seen by my parents’ church as crucial steps towards the universal stamp of 666. Nowadays, politicians appear to see themselves as instruments of biblical prophecy. This doesn’t seem to me much different from the woman who’s told by the palm reader that her future includes a tall dark stranger, and then goes out to find one.